Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus

(games, history)

(Or "Wumpus") /wuhm'p*s/ A famous fantasy
computer game, created by Gregory Yob in about 1973.

Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Creative Computing, Vol 1, No 5,
Sep - Oct 1975, where Yob says he had come up with the game
two years previously, after seeing the grid-based games
Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump at People's Computing Company
(PCC). He later delivered Wumpus to PCC who published it in
their newsletter.

ESR says he saw a version including termites running on the
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in 1972-3.

Magnus Olsson, in his 1992-07-07 USENET article
<9207071854.AA21847@thep.lu.se>, posted the BASICsource code of what he believed was pretty much the version that was
published in 1973 in David Ahl's "101 Basic Computer Games",
by Digital Equipment Corporation.

The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an
dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported
other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius
strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave
with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to
three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit
(later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very
angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to
map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus
(which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you
up and drop you at a random location (later versions added
"anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and
earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).

This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like
the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the
dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to
both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat
colony).

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